Note 47 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

Anatole France, La Vie Littéraire, tome ii, p. 274. The nationalist desires in French writers which I have been pointing out have had other than political results; no one will ever be able to say how many among them in the past fifty years have falsified their talents, mistaken their true gifts in their endeavours to ‘feel in the French manner’. A good example is the Voyage de Sparte, where so many pages show what a beautiful piece of work it might have been if the author had not forced himself to feel his Lorrain soul under a Greek sky. Here we come upon one of the most curious characteristics in the writers of this age; the rejection of freedom of mind for themselves, the thirst for ‘a discipline’ (the whole fortune of MM. Maurras and Maritain comes from this), a thirst which in most of them is the result of a fundamental intellectual nihilism. (On this nihilism in Barrès, see Curtius, ‘Barrès and the intellectual foundations of French nationalism,’ extracts in Union pour la Vérité, May, 1925; in Maurras, see Guy-Grand, op. cit., p. 19; and L. Dimier, Vingt Ans d’Action Française, p. 330: ‘I have never seen a more unhappy soul than his.’) But the psychology of contemporary writers in itself and apart from its political action is not my subject here.